I've just switched from Mandrake 10.0 to the latest Ubuntu (5.04) and I'm having difficulty getting my wireless card working again. Its a Linksys WMP54G PCI card. I eventually had it working under Mandrake using ndiswrapper, but I haven't been able to get it working under Ubuntu.

I've installed ndiswrapper.
tells me the driver and hardware are present

I can set the WEP key and mode with iwconfig, but it won't accept the ESSID. I type , but when I type it still says "any". If I change the mode from "managed" to "auto" it lets me set the ESSID but it switches to ad-hoc.

gives me no results when the mode is "managed" and gives me a single result when the mode is "auto". The single result doesn't match the router or any other machine in the building. I get the impression that leaving it on "auto" lets it set up its own little network of just this one machine. Needless to say that's useless.

A couple of threads indicate that the power could be off. The only way to fix this that I've seen is to change the RadioState in /etc/ndiswrapper/driver/some-conf-file.conf. I've tried RadioState|1 and RadioState|0 (which it was initially and everyone says it should be).

I've also seen some references to running lspci. I don't know what those people were looking for but... lspci has a line representing the card.

Any suggestions?

When you use iwconfig, are you doing it under your user account or have you used sudo to run with root permisions?

Therefore, your command would be and then you would enter password at the prompt.

Yeah, I'm doing it all as root. I managed to get it to recognise that the network is there. I get the proper access point and ESSID., and those settings stick. This came about when I removed the Windows driver that came with the card and replaced it with a similar one provided by HP/Compaq for their card with the same or similar chipset.

Now I've got iwconfig telling me that it's on the network "evergreenterrace" (my home network) and it has the right access point MAC address but I can't ping anything, not even the router.

I'm using Windows right now so I don't have the output to hand, but route gives me something like:
I can't remember all of the details, but it looks like it wants to connect to anything on the network directly and to anything else via 192.168.1.254 (my DSL modem). If I'm right about that interpretation then that's set up correctly.

What could be stopping me from pinging the router after iwlist and iwconfig can see it?

You need to get the card to look for an address. Tryas root.

My router doesn't run DHCP; I have assigned a static IP to each machine.

Thanks for your help. I've managed to sort it out. I changed the router to use DHCP and made sure I could get an IP that way, so I was sure there was some communication going on. I still wasn't able to ping the router, but when I rebooted the machine it stalled for ages trying to synchronise the system clock, which it had just failed on before. I figured I was getting a name server timeout rather than a network timeout. I tried pinging the router when it finally booted and... still nothing. Then I tried the modem (seperate device due to our odd setup here) which responded to ping instantly. I opened Firefox and accessed the router's Web-based setup. I was able to get to it. I'm still not able to ping it! Weird. Anyway, after a little fiddling with route (my router wants to be the default gateway but it doesn't work unless the modem is the default), I'm able to get online. I'm posting this from Ubuntu.

Thanks again.

Congratulations and what a very very weird thing to happen. One thing which strikes is that you could have triedin fact, I'd suggest you read through 'man ifconfig' as it has a number of useful options.